Key Findings:

1. Chromosomal Fusion and Its Molecular Signature:

   • The fusion site is located at 2q13–2q14.1 and is characterized by degenerate telomeric sequences appearing interstitially, indicating the historical head-to-head joining of ancestral chromosomes.
   • Despite being a signature of a past fusion event, these telomeric repeats are no longer functional and have undergone sequence degradation over time.

2. Extensive Duplications in the Surrounding Genomic Region:

   • The study identifies large-scale segmental duplications flanking the fusion site, with several of these regions duplicated and scattered across multiple chromosomes.
   • These duplications are predominantly located in subtelomeric and pericentromeric regions, suggesting their role in genomic instability and chromosomal evolution.

3. Paralogous Regions and Their Evolutionary Relationships:

   • A 168-kilobase (kb) segment near the fusion site has 98%–99% sequence identity with three regions on chromosome 9 (9pter, 9p11.2, and 9q13).
   • Another 67-kb region distal to the fusion site shows a high degree of homology to sequences in chromosome 22qter.
   • Additionally, a 100-kb segment exhibits 96% sequence identity with a region in chromosome 2q11.2.

4. Comparative Genomics and Evolutionary Implications:

   • By comparing the duplicated sequences and their arrangement in primates, the researchers traced the order of duplication events leading to their present distribution.
   • The presence of specific repetitive elements within these duplicated segments serves as evolutionary markers that help infer their historical rearrangements.
   • Some of these duplicated regions are associated with chromosomal inversion breakpoints, potentially contributing to evolutionary changes in primates.
   • Recurrent structural rearrangements in these regions have been linked to human chromosomal disorders.

Conclusions and Implications:

• The findings provide valuable insights into the structural evolution of human chromosome 2, which played a crucial role in human speciation.
• Understanding these segmental duplications and their evolutionary trajectories sheds light on genomic instability, which may contribute to human genetic diseases.
• The study highlights how large-scale chromosomal rearrangements, such as fusion and duplication, have influenced the evolutionary divergence of humans from other primates.

This research advances our understanding of human genome evolution and offers a foundation for studying the effects of structural variants in genetic disorders.

You might learn a lot about that house—the rooms, the doors, the furniture—but you would miss the bigger story: the streets, the neighborhoods, and all the ways the city changes from one place to another.

Something similar happens when scientists study bacterial genomes one at a time.

Over the past decade, researchers have collected thousands of bacterial genomes. These genomes contain an enormous amount of information about how bacteria survive, adapt, and evolve. But comparing thousands of individual genomes can quickly become a computational maze.

That is where PANORAMA enters the story.

Developed by Jérôme Arnoux and colleagues, PANORAMA is a computational tool designed to explore bacterial pangenomes—the complete collection of genetic possibilities found across a species or group of related organisms. Instead of looking at every genome as an isolated object, the approach represents their shared and variable genetic features as a graph.

Think of this graph as a giant subway map.

Some stations appear on almost every route. These represent genes that are highly conserved. Other stations appear only on certain routes, representing genes that some bacteria possess while others do not. By looking at the entire network, scientists can begin to see not just *what genes exist*, but how they are organized and how biological systems are distributed across populations.

The researchers put PANORAMA to the test using 941 genomes of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium important in human health. They used the tool to investigate biological systems, including bacterial defense mechanisms against viruses known as bacteriophages. They then expanded the analysis to more than 6,000 genomes from four Enterobacteriaceae species.

The result is more than a faster way to process data.

PANORAMA allows researchers to ask a bigger question: What can an entire microbial species do, genetically speaking?

By comparing pangenomes, the researchers could identify systems shared between species as well as distinctive features. They could also find recurring genomic locations where genetic material is inserted—clues that may reveal common evolutionary processes.

And this is perhaps the most exciting part of the story.

Every bacterial genome is like a page in a huge evolutionary book. Until recently, reading thousands of those pages together was difficult. PANORAMA provides a way to turn those pages into a map, allowing scientists to see patterns that might disappear when each genome is studied separately.

The study, published in PLOS Computational Biology in July 2026, presents PANORAMA as a foundation for large-scale comparative pangenomics. The software and accompanying analysis resources are openly available, giving other researchers the opportunity to explore microbial diversity themselves.

So the story is not really about one bacterium or one genome.

It is about changing the way we look at life.

Instead of asking, “What is inside this genome?”, scientists can increasingly ask, “What is the full genetic landscape of this species—and how did it become this way?”

And sometimes, when you stop looking at one house and finally see the whole city, the most interesting discoveries are hiding in the streets between them.

Read more at https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013856

A recent study by Webster and Chapman introduces Buscogeny (https://github.com/Jwebster89/Buscogeny), an open-source bioinformatics pipeline designed to make this process easier. The tool uses BUSCO (Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs), which identifies conserved genes that are expected to occur as single copies in particular groups of organisms. These genes act like evolutionary landmarks, allowing researchers to compare genomes and investigate their relationships.

Buscogeny brings several steps of phylogenomic analysis into one workflow. It identifies BUSCO genes, extracts and aligns their sequences, removes unreliable regions, combines information from multiple genes, and uses the resulting data to construct a phylogenetic tree. It also provides quality-control information, helping researchers identify genomes that may be too incomplete for reliable analysis.

The authors demonstrate the usefulness of Buscogeny with bacterial and fungal genomes, including Alternaria. This is particularly valuable because fungal genomes can vary greatly in quality and annotation. Ultimately, Buscogeny helps transform massive amounts of genomic data into an understandable evolutionary story. Each DNA sequence becomes a clue, each conserved gene becomes a landmark, and together these clues reveal a picture of how life is connected.

More at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10123-025-00752-6?

"In neuroscience, the project will use neuroinformatics and brain simulation to collect and integrate experimental data, identifying and filling gaps in our knowledge, and prioritising future experiments.

In medicine, the HBP will use medical informatics to identify biological signatures of brain disease, allowing diagnosis at an early stage, before the disease has done irreversible damage, and enabling personalized treatment, adapted to the needs of individual patients. Better diagnosis, combined with disease and drug simulation, will accelerate the discovery of new treatments, drastically lowering the cost of drug discovery.

In computing, new techniques of interactive supercomputing, driven by the needs of brain simulation, will impact a vast range of industries. Devices and systems, modelled after the brain, will overcome fundamental limits on the energy-efficiency, reliability and programmability of current technologies, clearing the road for systems with brain-like intelligence."

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2013/10/07/the-human-brain-project-begins/ 

(https://www.facebook.com/humanbrainproj/info)

Home Page:

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/

Jobs:

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/participate/jobs

What is HiBC?

The Human Intestinal Bacteria Collection (HiBC) is a comprehensive, high-quality reference repository of bacterial isolates derived from human fecal samples. It focuses on anaerobic and facultative anaerobic bacteria that play pivotal roles in digestion, immune modulation, vitamin synthesis, and pathogen resistance. The collection includes both culturable strains and genomic data from unculturable taxa, bridging the gap between culture-dependent and -independent microbiome studies.

Why is HiBC Important?

1. Understanding Microbiome-Host Interactions
   HiBC enables deeper insight into the functions of specific bacterial taxa in the gut. With well-characterized isolates, researchers can conduct mechanistic studies to explore how certain bacteria influence metabolism, inflammation, or mental health.

2. Precision Probiotics and Therapeutics
   By providing access to native human gut microbes, HiBC supports the development of next-generation probiotics, live biotherapeutic products (LBPs), and fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) alternatives.

3. Standardization and Reproducibility
   With standardized cultivation and genomic protocols, HiBC ensures consistency across microbiome research studies, improving reproducibility and comparability of findings.

4. Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Surveillance
   HiBC includes metadata on antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), helping track the spread of AMR in commensal gut bacteria and understanding its implications for human health.

Key Features of HiBC

• Culturable Bacteria Repository: A living collection of anaerobic and facultative strains isolated from healthy and diseased individuals worldwide.

• Metadata-rich Entries: Each isolate is annotated with host details (age, health status, diet), geographical origin, phenotypic traits, and antibiotic susceptibility profiles.

• Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS): High-quality genome assemblies for most strains to support functional and comparative genomics.

• Interactive Database Access: User-friendly search and filtering options for strain selection based on taxonomy, function, or clinical relevance.

• Cross-linking with Other Databases: Integration with NCBI, GOLD, and Human Microbiome Project (HMP) data for broader context and validation.

Applications of HiBC

• Microbiome-based diagnostics and biomarker discovery

• Host-microbe interaction studies in gnotobiotic mouse models

• Gut microbiome modulation through diet, drugs, or engineered bacteria

• Longitudinal studies of gut flora across age, geography, and lifestyle

• Environmental and evolutionary microbiology of human-associated bacteria

Accessing HiBC

Researchers and interested parties can explore the HiBC database through its official website: https://www.hibc.rwth-aachen.de/. The platform offers comprehensive information on bacterial isolates, including taxonomy, cultivation conditions, and genomic data, facilitating advanced research in human gut microbiome studies.

Final Thoughts

The HiBC is a cornerstone resource in the rapidly evolving field of microbiome research. As science moves toward personalized medicine and microbial therapeutics, having a reliable and diverse collection of human gut bacteria is not just useful — it's essential. Whether you're a microbiologist, clinician, computational biologist, or biotechnologist, HiBC offers tools to accelerate discovery and innovation in gut microbiome science.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.dkfz.de/en/applied-bioinformatics/telomerehunter/telomerehunter.html

Address of the bookmark: http://ancestralgenomes.org/

The fellowship is part of a larger Nordic collaborative project, MarGen_II, financed by the EU Interreg Öresund-Kattegat-Skagerrak Programme, the Danish Rod and Net License Funds and the National Institute of Aquatic Resources (DTU Aqua). The project will primarily be carried out in the population genetics group, Section for Marine Living Resources, situated in Silkeborg, Denmark. DTU Aqua is an institute at the Technical University of Denmark. In addition, the position offers many opportunities for collaborating with Nordic and other European colleagues in the field.

Application:
Apply online at
https://www.dtu.dk/english/About/JOB-and-CAREER/vacant-positions/job?id=d198fd80-4856-4a56-943d-485106026504.
The deadline is 4 January 2021. For further information, please contact
Senior Researcher Jakob Hemmer-Hansen, jhh@aqua.dtu.dk.

You can read more about DTU Aqua at www.aqua.dtu.dk
and the population genetics group at
https://www.aqua.dtu.dk/english/research/population_genetics.

All interested candidates irrespective of age, gender, race, disability,
religion or ethnic background are encouraged to apply.

Jakob Hemmer Hansen

It takes as an input a set of genomes represented as sequences of genes (or synteny blocks) and produces such sequences for ancestral genomes at the internal nodes of the phylogenetic tree.

The phylogenetic tree may be also specified completely or partially, in the latter case MGRA can reconstruct conserved ancestral regions (CARs) of the ancestral genome of interest.

Since version 2 MGRA supports gene insertion and deletions in addition to genome rearrangements and allows the input genomes to have different gene content.

It also can reconstruct most plausible phylogenetic tree based on the rearrangement characters.

Address of the bookmark: http://mgra.cblab.org/

Once a query gene has been entered, it is displayed in its genomic context in parallel to the genomic context of all its orthologous and paralogous copies in all the other sequenced metazoan genomes. Moreover, Genomicus stores and displays the predicted ancestral genome structure in all the ancestral species within the phylogenetic range of interest.

All the data on extant species displayed in this browser are from Ensembl.

Address of the bookmark: http://genomicus.biologie.ens.fr/genomicus-90.01/cgi-bin/search.pl